MICHAEL FIELDING
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
ABSTRACT. The paper opens by asking sharp questions about the current vogue for
consulting students about various aspects of their experience of schooling. The unwitting manipulation often embedded in much of this activity is contrasted with a radical
approach known as ‘Students as Researchers.’ Having described the still current joint work
in a UK high school that has developed since 1996 the paper moves on to consider the
transformational nature of the project and ends by offering two frameworks: one suggests
a number of key questions pertinent to any evaluation of the institutional conditions for
student voice; the other provides an overarching conceptual re-appraisal of the domain.
Practical examples are given and the compelling nature of the “Students as Researchers”
approach reaffirmed.
I NTRODUCTION
Those teachers and researchers who have for many years fought long
and hard for the legitimacy and necessity of student voice as central to
an authentic educative undertaking are currently faced with a disturbing
paradox, namely, that the very processes and form of engagement to which
they have been so committed are in danger of turning out to be stifling
rather than empowering, not only for students, but for their teachers too.
On the one hand, teachers, researchers, parents and adults in general speak
too readily and too presumptuously on behalf of young people whose
perspective they often misunderstand and, in many contexts, frequently
disregard. There are some (e.g. Connolly, 1997; Rudduck, Chaplin &
Wallace, 1996) who urge caution, but by and large such warnings as there
are go unnoticed or unheeded. On the other hand, students’ views are
sought more often and more urgently than ever before, usually via teacher
generated questionnaires, increasingly (and ironically) administered by
fellow students. What both have in common is fear and the attendant desire
to control. Student voice is sought primarily through insistent imperatives
of accountability rather than enduring commitments to democratic agency.
The value of student perceptions in contemporary high stakes contexts
consists largely in their capacity to alert schools to shortcomings of their
current performance and possible ways of addressing the deficiencies. The
Journal of Educational Change 2: 123–141, 2001.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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MICHAEL FIELDING
cost of ignoring student perspectives that point to a significant area of
professional concern could well turn out to have tangible consequences in
an inspection report or public perception of the school’s local and regional
standing.
Of course, raising test scores and holding teachers accountable for
increased productivity are not necessarily antithetical to a democratic
project or other more widely conceived intentions. However, the pressures of a narrowly articulated agenda too often jeopardise an adequate
realization of genuinely educative endeavour. Certainly, the underlying
intellectual framework of school effectiveness cannot, by its very nature,
accommodate the integrity of an approach that sees ends and means
as necessarily interwoven (Fielding, 2000). And there lies the rub. If
we are to avoid the dangers of developing increasingly sophisticated
ways of involving students that, often unwittingly, end up betraying their
interests, accommodating them to the status quo, and in a whole variety
of ways reinforcing assumptions and approaches that are destructive of
anything that could be considered remotely empowering, then we have to
explore approaches that have different starting points and quite different
dispositions and intentions.
The work described in this paper is rooted in just such an attempt: it
argues for a transformative, ‘transversal’ approach in which the voices of
students, teachers and significant others involved in the process of education construct ways of working that are emancipatory in both process and
outcome. I have argued elsewhere for the resilience and persuasiveness of
its intellectual roots in the field of social science research (Fielding, 1998),
drawing in particular on feminist researchers like Linda Alcoff (Alcoff,
1991/2) and Beth Humphries (Humphries, 1994) and on the enduring
work of Yvonna Lincoln (Lincoln, 1993; 1995). What I wish to do here
is provide concrete instantiation of its practical and theoretical resonance
in a collaborative research and development project between Sharnbrook
Upper School & Community College, a Bedfordshire Upper School (High
School) serving students between the ages of 13 and 18, and myself over a
period of three years.1
T HE STUDENTS AS RESEARCHERS P ROJECT
Year 1 (1996–1997)
What came to be known as the Students as Researchers project began
life in November 1996 as part of Sharnbrook Upper School’s participation in the IQEA (Improving the Quality of Education for All) school
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
125
improvement initiative based at the University of Cambridge School of
Education. Sharnbrook had been part of IQEA for some time and had a
long-established tradition of teacher research and evaluation. It also had
a strong tradition of student involvement that included year and school
councils, student led action teams trained in peer counselling, student
representation on the governing body and a number of other initiatives such
as student curriculum evaluation groups that participated in departmental
unit and course reviews in some curriculum areas.
In the winter term of the first year a small group of staff began to
look in a concerted way at the issue of student involvement in the life
of the school and, more particularly, at the issue of student voice. As the
IQEA link person I brought to the enquiry a background of experience and
interest in issues of student involvement. We2 made the decision to form a
group of students of mixed age and gender and a range of attainment who,
together with three members of staff in support roles, would be trained in
research and evidence gathering techniques as well as establishing a shared
understanding of the values, dispositions and commitments which would
make partnership between students and staff both real and demanding.
Students as Researchers was to be an initiative in which students themselves identified issues they saw as important in their daily experience of
schooling and, with the support of staff in facilitating and enabling roles,
gathered data, made meaning together and put forward subsequent recommendations for change shared with their fellow students, with staff and
with the governing body of the school. As such it was a quantum leap, not
only from traditional approaches to student involvement such as student
councils and peer-led learning, but also from the engagement of students
in staff-led action research which was by then an established feature of
Sharnbrook’s professional culture. Here the location of power, perspective
and energizing dynamic was to rest primarily in the collective control of
the students themselves.
We studied what little literature we could find related to our initial
intentions. Whilst in a number of significant respects very different from
the approach we wished to take, we found the work of Nieto (Nieto,
1994), Rudduck (Rudduck et al., 1996) and Suzanne Soo-Hoo (Soo-Hoo,
1993) very helpful. Closest and most resonant with our aspirations was
the ‘Students as Evaluators’ initiative pioneered by Campbell et al. (1994)
which worked in ways that seemed to us to be more overtly empowering of
the students involved, less heavily dependent on university or third party
engagement and potentially more congenial to incorporation within the
structures and cultures of daily life within the state school system. We
also drew on my own experience of innovative student involvement in the
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MICHAEL FIELDING
UK in the mid 1980s (Fielding, 1989) and on the rich history of student
engagement characteristic of Sharnbrook’s ethos and identity.
We took considerable care, both at the start of the initiative and at
subsequent regular intervals, not just to inform staff what we were trying
to do but draw on any existing experience and enthusiasm which might
help us in our work. Our approach was intended to be open and dialogic,
not merely managed and informative.3
Our first cohort consisted of fifteen students ranging from Year 9 (aged
13 years) to Year 13 (aged 17 years). Prior to those students and the
three supporting members of staff coming away for a day’s training at the
university I ran an introductory session in which we began to explore what
it was we were trying to do and how we might go about it. It quickly
became evident that the sophistication and insight of the students was
substantial, that their concerns and aspirations mirrored those expressed
by staff and that the issues they wished to explore included matters of
profound significance, both to themselves and to their teachers. As well as
providing grounding in a number of key issues in the conduct of school
based research, the training day itself offered a further opportunity to
explore intentions, establish priorities and, most important of all, work
towards a shared understanding of the principles and values which were
to underpin the work of the group.
The group decided to explore three topics – student voice, student
experience of trainee teachers and the school’s assessment and profiling
system. With the support of a member of staff over the ensuing two
months, they gathered data in a variety of ways and occasionally met as
a whole group for further sessions either to support each other’s workin-progress or to have further external support with data analysis and the
presentation of findings. Each group produced a report setting out their
research intentions, outlining their methodology, presenting their data and
its analysis, and offering recommendations for future action. The reports
were presented by the students themselves at a range of different forums
including parents’ evenings, governing body meetings, student council
meetings, internal TV broadcasts to tutor groups, staff meetings and also
to special interest groups who had a particular stake in the area that had
been researched.
In two of the research areas the recommendations had substantial
and immediate impact: the school’s assessment and profiling system
has changed in ways which explicitly acknowledged the Students as
Researchers work; and members of the school council now have an
entitlement to a range of training and support which acknowledges the
demanding nature of their role. The recommendations of the group looking
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
127
at student experience of trainee teachers were taken up by the school,
but they were unable to persuade their university partners to adopt them,
at least in the first instance. Now, some two years later, the school has
returned to those recommendations and, as I indicate later in the paper, the
suggestion that students and trainee teachers establish mutually supportive
and demanding dialogic encounters looking at students’ experience of
teaching and learning has been incorporated in a pilot scheme with six
trainee teachers and twenty two students.
Year 2 (1997–1998)
Year 2 involved a slightly larger cohort of students and saw a range of
interesting internal developments. Some students chose to continue their
work as student researchers operating in a similar mode as in Year 1.
Others who continued did so as Student Consultants offering support and
advice to the new research groups, but not getting involved on a regular
basis with the collection of data and other practical aspects of the research
process. Those students who continued their involvement also helped in
the design of the training day and played key roles at various points in the
day itself.
The topics researched were more wide-ranging. Again three groups
emerged, this time looking at aspects of careers education, the quality of
school meals and the life skills programme. The data gathering became
more sophisticated, more varied and more imaginative, often seeking to
raise awareness of the Students as Researchers work through the methods
of data collection themselves.
As in Year 1, the impact of all three research groups was visible and
significant. The most far-reaching and most radical was the research and
recommendations of the life skills group. In essence the students were
saying three things. Firstly, they were puzzled as to why the school insisted
that all tutors had to teach the life skills programme which included issues
like adolescent sexuality and drug education. It was clear that a significant
number of staff were embarrassed and thus ill-equipped to teach areas
with particular sensitivities involved. Students felt embarrassed on their
behalf and suggested greater involvement of external or highly motivated
and trained people at particular points, including older students at the
school. Secondly, they highlighted an overdidactic, rather monochrome
pedagogy that gave students little room to use IT skills or get involved in
more active and engaging forms of learning. Lastly, and most radically,
they challenged the whole model of curriculum that underpins current
thinking and practice in the UK. What they were advocating was not a
longer list of topics to choose from; rather they were arguing for a move
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away from curriculum as delivery to curriculum as the joint making of
meaning. Whilst recognising the necessity of teacher perspectives and
priorities informing the programme they nonetheless urged the school to
acknowledge and incorporate their perspectives as students; a negotiated
curriculum and a negotiated pedagogy seemed to them to make more sense
as we approach the new century.
The quality of the research and the elegance and strength of the
students’ advocacy, particularly at a substantial presentation to staff on a
professional development day, has led to profound changes in the life skills
curriculum. Even more remarkably and more radically, not only did the
curriculum and its attendant pedagogies undergo significant change, the
group monitoring and evaluating the impact of the new provision includes
three students. As I shall argue later, what we are witnessing here are
profound cultural and structural changes in the professional identity and
working practices of a large, very successful secondary comprehensive
school, changes that are student-led and sustained by the richness and
attentiveness of a dialogic culture.
Year 3 (1998–1999)
Year 3 has seen an extension of the Student Consultant role, four research
groups have been operating, one of which consists solely of Year 9
students (13 years old). The research methods continue to extend their
repertoire and there is much more contact with other schools, both in
the UK and abroad. The video-conferencing links with Canada and the
regional networking which were established in Year 2 have been extended
to include presentations at a number of national conferences, including
one at the DFES (UK ministry of education). International visitors have
led to successful research bids in other countries including, most recently,
a three year research project funded by FONDYCET in Chile using
student researchers as the key agents in the development of pedagogies and
curriculum materials dedicated to the development of education in and for
democracy (Fielding & Prieto 2000; Prieto 2001).
THE
R ADICAL C HALLENGE :
E MERGENCE OF T RANSFORMATIONAL I SSUES AND I NNOVATIVE
P RACTICE
Inevitably an initiative of this kind raises a huge number of issues which
have to do both with the uneven daily realities of innovation and the
nurturing of a sympathetic professional culture to sustain it. Among these
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
129
there are some that are particularly challenging and push hard at the boundaries of our current traditions and practices, three of which seem to me
particularly compelling. The first has to do with issues surrounding the
relationship between the cultures and structures of institutional development; the second has to do with the possibility and desirability of what
I shall call a ‘radical collegiality’ between students and teachers; and
the third has to do with the usefulness or otherwise of a ‘transversal’
approach to student voice which runs parallel with the recent emergence
of transversal politics (Cockburn & Hunter, 1999; Yuval-Davis, 1999).
The Emergence of New Organizational Structures
One of the most interesting things about the Students as Researchers
project which looked at the life skills programme in the school lies not
only in the depth and quality of the challenge it posed to contemporary
curriculum orthodoxy, both in the school and more widely in the UK
context. It also lies in the fact that the richness of its work and the manifest
quality of its insights and recommendations led to the emergence of new
organizational structures which incorporated students as equal partners in
the process of curriculum renewal. My own feeling is that whilst the quality
of the work of that particular student research group was responsible for
much of the force of its transformative momentum, it was the cumulative
presence and power of the Students as Researchers work as a whole that
prompted the radical incorporation of students on the team monitoring and
evaluating the new life skills programme.
In this instance at any rate, structural change seems to have followed
from cultural changes in attitudes to students, changes brought about
through the students’ capacity both to demonstrate the quality of their
research and to identify and articulate insights into curriculum practices
and curriculum models in ways which were not forthcoming from teaching
staff. New structures that have the power to invite and retain commitment
seem more likely to arise from transformative practices (in this case led
by students) that gradually generate a cumulative authenticity and robustness over time. Because the assumptions and values which shape the form
and texture of their daily reality are differently configured to prevailing
school norms, they have difficulty finding a place within existing organizational arrangements and new forms arise to accommodate and further
their development.
Radical Collegiality
The second set of challenging issues I should like to highlight from the
Students as Researchers work at Sharnbrook push us to consider not just
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the double fact that students see different issues and see issues differently, but also the fact that the nature of teaching in schools is such that
a professionalism adequate to our needs in the twenty-first century must
incorporate a much more overt openness and reciprocity indicative of a
much more flexible, dialogic form of democratic practice. In other words,
contemporary teacher professionalism needs to incorporate an expectation
that teacher learning is both enabled and enhanced by dialogic encounters
with their students in which the interdependent nature of teaching and
learning and the shared responsibility for its success is made explicit.
These issues were raised in embryonic form by the research group
looking at student experience of trainee teachers in Year 1, but, as I
indicated earlier, the school was not able to gain the support from the
universities involved. Interestingly, this year (Year 3) has seen a successful
pilot involving six trainee teachers and twenty two students, six mentors,
and two other experienced members of staff. Each trainee teacher worked
with three students across the ability range from one of their classes
(though in the case of an advanced level Biology group of 16- to 18year-olds the pilot involved the whole class of eight students). I worked
separately with each constituency (students, trainees and mentors) before
running a joint session in which possible approaches to data collection
and a common set of values and understandings were established. The
ensuing work proved very fruitful and initial evidence suggests that the
two research questions, (a) ‘Is trainee teacher professional development
enhanced by reciprocal dialogic encounter with students about the quality
of teaching and learning?’ and (b) ‘Is student participation in this initiative
supportive of their own metacognitive growth?’ could both be answered
very positively.
What we have here is a concrete instantiation of what I have elsewhere
called ‘radical collegiality’ (Fielding, 1999), a collegiality constitutive of
a professionalism commensurate with the move towards a more dialogic
form of democracy. Here teachers learn not only with and from each other,
from parents and from their community, but also, and more particularly,
from their students.
Transversal Politics and the Possibility of an Inclusive Emancipatory
Community
One of the most difficult conceptual and practical issues confronting many
societies across the world today concerns the development of an inclusive,
emancipatory community. How, on the one hand, do we avoid the totalizing tendencies of modernist accounts of community and on the other
hand avoid the shifting anomie of its post-modern counterpart? Recent
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131
feminist approaches to bringing together those from warring or diametrically opposed groupings (for example in Palestine, Bosnia and Northern
Ireland) points to the possibility of a transversal politics in which difference is acknowledged and valued in ways which neither embrace a false
consensus nor dissipate and fragment the possibility of genuinely shared
understandings and joint action. In the words of Cockburn and Hunter,
transversal politics “is a tolerance of distinctiveness which is at the same
time an intolerance of non-communication. Metaphorically and actually
this means multi-lingualism” (Cockburn & Hunter, 1999, p. 91). What a
transversal approach seems to require is, firstly, a robust understanding of
the differences involved; secondly, a set of egalitarian values and dispositions which are both respectful and acknowledging of the legitimacy
of those differences; and thirdly, a sense that the experience of dialogic
encounter and the engagement of joint work begin to open up new understandings and insights. These in turn generate a new and interesting sense
of practical and hopeful possibilities that nurture a genuinely inclusive
sense of community in which each cares for the other reciprocally.
Much of the work emerging at Sharnbrook seems to have a transversal quality to it. Thus, as demonstrated in Table I below, the values
and principles which form such a central part of the training of the student
researchers and the staff supporting them is set out in dialogic form with
the student perspective on the left hand side and the staff perspective on
the right. The power and potential of the project lies in the open acknowledgement of the legitimacy of both perspectives and in the necessity of
their reciprocally conditioning joint pursuit. Each depends on both the
acknowledged legitimacy of difference and the manifest reciprocity of its
articulation for its practical energy and its creative drive.
A second example of a dialogic or transversal approach to student voice
typical of the Students as Researchers initiative can be seen in its approach
to communication. Considerable care was taken not only to communicate
with fellow students about the conduct and outcomes of the research,
but to use as many occasions as possible to learn with and from staff.
Thus, some of the most fruitful phases of the research work have involved
student researchers running workshops about their work-in-progress on
staff professional development days or in staff meetings of various kinds.
Here the approach has been to share current work, not in the sense of the
traditional unidirectional (and usually sterile) dissemination, but rather to
articulate puzzles and problems as well as delights. These are occasions in
which all participants are involved in creating new knowledge and doing
so together: the resonance and productiveness of the sessions depends on
the degree to which the dialogic encounter instantiates the reciprocally
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TABLE I
Students as researchers: principles & values
Partnership
∗ Look at issues identified by students
∗ Look at issues identified by staff
∗ Respect the validity of student perspec- ∗ Respect the professionalism of teachers
tives
∗ Use existing expertise of students
∗ Use existing expertise of staff
Positive Orientation
∗ Improvement through involvement
∗ Share and extend good practice
∗ Enhance communication between
∗ Enhance communication between
+ students and students
+ staff and staff
+ students and staff
+ staff and students
Centrality of Learning
∗ Enhance learning of all students about
∗ Enhance the learning of all staff about
+ researching key issues
+ researching key issues
+ discussing and acting on research find- + discussing and acting on research findings
ings
+ further developing the school as a learn- + further developing the school as learning
ing community
community
+ staff as learners
+ student potential
Equity & Authenticity
∗ Involve a range of students
∗ Involve a range of staff
∗ Student contributions valued equally
∗ Staff contributions valued equally
+ by each other
+ by each other
+ by staff
+ by students
Quality Assurance
∗ Rigorous preparation of Student Resear- ∗ Awareness raising and engagement with
chers
staff
From Reflection to Action
∗ Link to action / change
∗ Link to action / change
+ students acknowledge their part in the + staff acknowledge their part in the shared
shared responsibility
responsibility
∗ Share research findings with relevant ∗ Share research findings with relevant
people
people
+ students + staff + governors + parents + community
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
133
conditioning principles of freedom and equality which are constitutive of
emancipatory community (Fielding, 2000).
THE
N EED TO A DDRESS W IDER C ONCEPTUAL I SSUES
The Students as Researchers initiative at Sharnbrook offers much that is
hopeful, brave and creative in times that are increasingly disfigured by the
deeply dull and destructive discourse of performativity which continues to
be such a substantial flaw in the UK government’s approach to education. It
nonetheless has a very long way to go, and properly so. One of the reasons
it is such a worthwhile development is its capacity to help us see what
some of the key issues are if we are to make progress in a field which
has stagnated for some time. Drawing on some very interesting parallel or
complementary research in Australia (Atweh et al., 1998; GroundwaterSmith, 1999), North America (Bartfai & Webb-Dempsey, 1997; Bryant et
al., 1997; Campbell et al., 1994; Egan-Robertson & Bloome, 1998; Garcia
et al., 1995; Goldman & Newman, 1998; Kushman, 1997; Kranendonk
& Quilling, 1996; Lincoln, 1993, 1995; NCSLEA, 1994; Nieto, 1994;
Oldfather, 1995; Soo-Hoo, 1993, 1995; Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1998;
Thiessen, 1997) South America (Fielding & Prieto 2000; Prieto 2001) and
the UK (Atweh & Burton, 1995; Connolly, 1997; Doherty, 1997; Duffield
& Allan, 1999; Fielding, 1998, 2001; Fielding et al., 1999; MacBeath,
1998, 1999a,b; Pickering, 1997; Rafferty, 1997; Rudduck et al., 1996;
Wetherill, 1998) I would suggest two sets of issues that have conceptual
as well as practical resonance: the first has to do with understanding more
clearly and more acutely what conditions are most likely to foster student
voice as a transformative force rather than as an unwitting adjunct to the
increasingly irrelevant and pernicious paradigm of school effectiveness.
Evaluating the Conditions for Student Voice
In Table II below I set out nine clusters of questions which arise out of
the Students as Researchers initiative and which seem to me to apply
equally well to any set of arrangements which seek to move more closely
and more authentically to a practice of dialogic democracy. The questions
themselves concern speaking, listening, attitudes, systems, spaces, action
and the future and, with the exception of the last set, together enable us to
apply a simple but searching interrogatory framework to arrangements and
practices which seek to both acknowledge and promote student voice.
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MICHAEL FIELDING
TABLE II
Evaluating the conditions for student voice
Speaking
• Who is allowed to speak?
• To whom are they allowed to speak?
• What are they allowed to speak about?
• What language is encouraged / allowed?
• Who decides the answer to these questions?
• How are those decisions made?
• How, when, where, to whom and how often are those decisions
communicated?
Listening
• Who is listening?
• Why are they listening?
• How are they listening?
Skills
• Are the skills of dialogue encouraged and supported through
training or other appropriate means?
• Are those skills understood, developed and practised within the
context of democratic values and dispositions?
• Are those skills themselves transformed by those values and
dispositions?
Attitudes &
Dispositions
• How do those involved regard each other?
• To what degree are the principle of equal value and the dispositions of care felt reciprocally and demonstrated through the reality
of daily encounter?
Systems
• How often does dialogue and encounter in which student voice is
centrally important occur?
• Who decides?
• How do the systems enshrining the value and necessity of student
voice mesh with or relate to other organizational arrangements
(particularly those involving adults)?
Organizational
Culture
• Do the cultural norms and values of the school proclaim the centrality of student voice within the context of education as a shared
responsibility and shared achievement?
• Do the practices, traditions and routine daily encounters demonstrate values supportive of student voice?
Spaces
• Where are the public spaces (physical and metaphorical) in which
these encounters might take place?
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
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TABLE II
Continued
• Who controls them?
• What values shape their being and their use?
Action
• What action is taken?
• Who feels responsible?
• What happens if aspirations and good intentions are not realized?
The Future
• Do we need new structures?
• Do we need new ways of relating to each other?
Towards an Intellectual Framework for Student Involvement
A second set of issues arising from the Students as Researchers work
at Sharnbrook and its companion international initiatives elsewhere help
us to take a further step back from questions about the most propitious
conditions for student voice and invite us to reconceive what is meant by
student involvement. Student voice and student involvement have become
increasingly vogue issues, yet we remain a good deal less clear about what
is meant by them than we ought to be and, equally worrying, even less
clear whose purposes are served by their current valorization.
Building in particular on the fine work of Douglas Barnes et al in
the late 1980s with their closed, framed and negotiated characterization
of teaching styles (Barnes et al, 1987), on Dennis Thiessen’s stimulating
triadic framework for configuring educational research and the involvement of young people (Thiessen, 1997), and on the incisive conceptual
mapping of both Roger Hart (Hart, 1992) and Mary John (John, 1996), I
suggest a four-fold model which distinguishes between students as sources
of data, students as active respondents, students as co-researchers, and
students as researchers.
Table III(a) below takes those categories and works through what they
might mean with regard to rationale, kinds of knowledge used, engagement
with students, student role and, lastly, the process of making meaning.
Table III(b) then seeks to apply the four categories at micro, meso and
macro levels, giving examples of what each might look like in classrooms,
departments/teams, and whole school contexts.
Although each of the four levels and kinds of student involvement are
characterized by distinctive assumptions and modes of operation, initiatives and practices are likely to move in and out of the different modes.
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TABLE III
Levels of student (pupil) involvement in school self review & school improvement
Students as
DATA SOURCE
Students as
ACTIVE
RESPONDENTS
Students as
CORESEARCHERS
Students as
RESEARCHERS
(a) rationale & engagement
Rationale
Teachers need to know
about students’ prior
learning / perceptions
of their learning in
order to teach effectively
Rationale
Teachers need to engage students in order
to fully enhance both
teaching and learning
Rationale
Teachers need to engage students as partners in learning in
order to deepen understanding and learning
Rationale
Students need to engage with their teachers
and peers in order to
deepen understanding
and learning
What Kind of Knowledge is Used
Knowing about student
performance and attitudes towards learning
What Kind of Knowledge is Used
Knowing how students
learn
What Kind of Knowledge is Used
Knowing what students might be able to
contribute to deepen
understanding
What Kind of Knowledge is Used
Knowing what teachers and peers might be
able to contribute to
deepen understanding
How Teachers Eng- How Teachers Eng- How Teachers Engage with Students
age with Students
age with Students
Listening in order to
Hearing
Acknowledging
learn
How Teachers Engage with Students
Listening in order to
contribute
Student Role
Recipients
Student Role
Initiators
Student Role
Discussants
Student Role
Co-Researchers
How Meaning is Made How Meaning is Made How Meaning is Made How Meaning is Made
Dissemination
Discussion
Dialogue (teacher led) Dialogue (student led)
(b) Classroom (pedagogy), Department / Team, School
Classroom
e.g.
• data about student
past performance
• explicit
criteria
Department / Team
e.g.
• looking at samples of
student work
Classroom
e.g.
• feedback techniques
on pedagogy (teacher
led)
assessment • developing metacognition
Classroom
e.g.
• feedback techniques
on pedagogy (student
led)
• developing metacognition & shared responsibility for learning
Department / Team
e.g.
• students co-research
aspects of pedagogy /
learning with teacher
Department / Team
e.g.
• students run session
for staff on how to
engage with particular
learning styles
Classroom
e.g.
• shared lesson
objectives
Department / Team
e.g.
• department agenda
based on student perception data / suggested by pupils
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
137
TABLE III
Continued
Students as
DATA SOURCE
Students as
ACTIVE
RESPONDENTS
Students as
CORESEARCHERS
• teacher-led action
research (ask students
for feedback)
• pupils involved in
evaluation of unit of
work
School
e.g.
• student attitude surveys
• exam & test performance
School
e.g.
• school student council
• peer-led action
groups
Students as
RESEARCHERS
• student suggestions
for new units of work
School
e.g.
• students support
school-based action
research by staff
School
e.g.
• student led review of
life skills programme
Different levels and modes will be appropriate at different times and in
different contexts. Whilst this flexibility and variation is quite proper, it
is, in any case, inevitable my own view that the ‘students as researchers’
mode is linked to a set of assumptions and values that are preferable to
the other three levels and that its mode of being offers a set of aspirations
which are worthy of our energies and our support. Students as Researchers
valorizes and extends a transformative notion of education at the heart of
which lies the commitment to teaching and learning as a genuinely shared
responsibility.
C ONCLUSION
The intellectual and practical motif which most readily captures both the
values and alternative practices exemplified in the Students as Researchers
initiative is that of mutuality, of education as both a shared responsibility
and a shared achievement predicated on the dispositions and demanding
realities of dialogic encounter. What is both exciting and daunting about
Students as Researchers is the way in which it both clarifies issues that are
central to the development of a dialogic learning community (whether it
be a school or some other kind of human practice) and the way it insists
on a response to fundamental questions those issues throw up. The issues
to which I am referring are at the heart, not only of what it means to be a
citizen, but also of what it means to be and become a person. They have
138
MICHAEL FIELDING
to do with both the intellectual and practical challenge of articulating what
an inclusive educational community might look and feel like. Central to
such a project are issues to do with power and authority, freedom and
equality, and, as important and necessary as each of these, the dispositions
and values of democratic living without which democracy itself becomes
a mere mechanism that more often than we would wish turns out to betray
the very aspirations that inspire its inception.
Students as Researchers is potentially as creative and important as it is
demanding, if only because it has within it the possibility of helping us to
make a practical and theoretical leap of grounded imagination that takes
seriously Raoul Vaneigem’s insistence that ‘A minute correction to the
essential is more important than a hundred new accessories’ (Vaneigem,
nd, p. 5).4
N OTES
1 The paper is offered as a suggestive interplay between empirical enquiry and theoretical
exploration. It is neither a fully substantiated case study, nor a predominantly intellectual
endeavour. Inevitably, such a hybrid runs the risk of irritating more than it stimulates, since
there is always so much more to be said. My thanks to the reviewer who chastised me on
just these grounds. Whilst I am unrepentant, I remain apprehensive: border crossing is hard
to do.
2 This was (and is) a research and development project in which I worked alongside
students and staff as well as with them. The ‘we’ referred to here was the deputy principal,
Louise Raymond, myself and two other members of the teaching staff, Robin Caudell, and
Tania Cooksey. In subsequent years the core team supporting the student researchers has
varied. It has included non-teaching staff, a part-time school-based researcher, and student
consultants i.e. students who had experience of the initiative in previous years, but who for
reasons of time subsequently wished to support student research, rather than continue to
be involved in fieldwork.
3 I am very aware of the dangers alluded to in Note 1 above. A more extensive description
of the Students as Researchers work at Sharnbrook would inevitably, and perhaps most
interestingly, explore the areas of conflict, disagreement and plain puzzlement that an initiative of this sort must encounter. The author is currently working on a fuller account and
would be happy to be in touch with interested readers. The Students as Researchers initiative at Sharnbrook and its development in other UK schools is central to two strands of the
current major ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) Network Project Consulting
Pupils About Teaching & Learning.
4 Students as Researchers has become a significant part of Sharnbrook Upper School’s
approach to curriculum renewal. This year (2000/2001) it involves around 90 students and
14 staff. See Raymond 2001 for an overview and exploration of the current international
upsurge of interest in student voice.
STUDENTS AS RADICAL AGENTS OF CHANGE
139
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AUTHOR ’ S B IO
Michael Fielding is Reader in Education at the University of Sussex
Institute of Education. A lifelong advocate of democratic comprehensive
education, his current research is concerned with student voice and
The articulation of more humanly fulfilling alternatives to the moribund
frameworks of school effectiveness.
MICHAEL FIELDING
Institute of Education
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9RG
UK
E-mail: m.fielding@sussex.ac.uk